Small Boys, Big Toys
Questioner: Acharya Ji, welcome to IIT Roorkee. We are currently at the E-Summit, surrounded by thousands of young minds who are being told entrepreneurship is the ultimate path to freedom, impact, and success.
In our textbooks and our screens, an entrepreneur is portrayed as a problem solver, someone who looks at the world, finds a form, and builds a company to fix it. But looking at your journey, moving from the heights of IIT and IIM to a life dedicated to the self, you've often hinted that doing is usually a mask for being.
I want to ask you: beyond the pitches, the funding rounds, and the innovation, what does it actually mean to be an entrepreneur in the truest sense of the word? Is it a journey of the ego trying to leave a dent in the universe, or is it a process of a person finally finding a work that is so right that they no longer need the world's validation? What is the self of an entrepreneur actually seeking?
Acharya Prashant: It depends on the entrepreneur. They come from all ends of the spectrum. It totally depends on the person who is starting out. Most of it is for the sake of making profits. That end, that goal, is fixed first, taken as a certainty, taken as an axiom, and then the typical entrepreneur reverse-engineers his way from that already determined, already imagined destination. The destination, almost always, is money. Simply money, more money. One cannot make as much money in a job as one can make as owner of a company, especially if one manages to sell that company off. That is usually the motive.
So there is not much to it in terms of understanding or philosophy. The game, when it comes to entrepreneurship, is astoundingly basic and primitive. Not just basic, primitive is a more accurate word here.
So, you don't know who you are. You're born in a family, and you just seek more and more of whatever you find around, and that's the way you are conditioned. These are the things around, and if you can accumulate more of these things, you will be happy and fulfilled.
So, when you are a kid, you want more toys. Then you want more friends. You reach your board exams, and you want more marks. Then you write a competitive examination, and you want to be in a higher percentile, numbers. You are accumulating numbers. Why? Because you do not know what you really want. Therefore, collecting numbers of any kind seems promising. That's what society and the collective ignorance tell us: accumulate, accumulate more numbers.
Then you enter the campus. Again, you want more of certain things, and all those things are numerical, right? Then you want a job with a bigger number, a fatter package. That again is a material number, right? “Can you please add 20% to the CTC?” Something of that kind.
And then you enter the world. You want a bigger vehicle, right? Bigger vehicle. You can measure the dimensions, length, leg space, all those things, height, width of the vehicle, and obviously the price. It has to be bigger than a flat or a villa, some kind of residence there again, you ask for the carpet area, the size of such things. That again is a number.
And then there is a particular ceiling to the salary you can achieve as a corporate worker. Even if there is not a ceiling, there is some kind of an upper limit to the year-on-year growth you can achieve, 10%, 20%. Top-class achiever, 30%, 35%. You won't usually exceed that.
So, you still want bigger numbers. You are still the same guy who wanted bigger toys, right? You are still that one who quarreled with his mother or her mother, saying, “I don't want that smaller car, I want the bigger rail engine. The mass is bigger, the dimensions are greater.” So now you say, “I'll be an entrepreneur.” Why? Not because there is some sublime underlying principle there? As I said, philosophy is astoundingly primitive. Now I want a bigger number. For what? You do not know.
Therefore, the very culmination, the summum bonum of entrepreneurship, is exit. You don't even celebrate the success, even the financial success, of your baby, your firm.
What you celebrate the most is the day you get to exit from your own firm. What kind of perversion is this? Have you noticed? What's celebrated the most is the exit. “Now I am free of my own company.” Why? Because it is never the company that you were in love with in the first place. It was all for the sake of a bigger toy.
You are still that immature kid, not grown up. All you are still chasing is material numbers. That's the entire thing. That's the whole principle.
But we are starstruck. Glamour captivates us, and we worship the so-called founders and the success stories as if there is a lot to that, and big words are used: “We are adding value to society and nation. We are helping India scale greater heights.”
Sir, you are still that boy quarreling for the toy train. You have nothing at all to do with any larger purpose or higher objective. Why are you humiliating the great words by just uttering them? You don't deserve to. Simply say, “I'm a money monger.” Nothing wrong with chasing money. Just that the bare fact has to be stated as it is. If you're chasing money, put it that way. Why enshrine it? Why glamorize it?
And that glamorization has a very adverse effect. Young kids like you are drawn towards that ecosystem without any kind of examination. The gloss blinds us, and then we don't care to examine. We don't care to ask uncomfortable questions. The moneybags become role models, and we look at them and say, “Wow.”
I'm pretty sure many of them would have adorned this very stage, and you would have returned captivated because we don't ask a basic question: “I am a human being, Homo sapiens. Who am I? And what am I here for? What am I here for?”
And behind the veneer, the same kid remains still grumbling, still dissatisfied, still frustrated, and more and more violent. Referred to the Epstein files now. Many of them, in fact probably all of them, are widely regarded and highly held role models, are they not?
Questioner: Yes, sir.
Acharya Prashant: Some of you might actually be carrying their posters in your hostel rooms, and that's who they are. And what has been exposed is not a scandalous exception. It is the norm.
When you don't get a toy, you snatch it, right? When you don't get sex, you again snatch it. It could be a woman, it could be a child. And if the resistance is too much, you proceed to kill the woman or the child because you are still that same person. Just that the unexamined system very cleverly manages to put an aura, a halo around you, and that mesmerizes young audiences.
Questioner: Sir, have a follow-up question. So how does one find that job, the right job that suits his soul, that fulfills him or her? Like, if an opportunity presents itself, how does one identify it?
Acharya Prashant: It's not about finding the right job. The right job for whom? The right job for whom? The right job for you. Before finding the right job, find yourself first. But we don't want to do that. Therefore, the discussion is always about an external object. “Oh, I want to find a job.” What is missing is the job? No, what is missing is you in the picture.
But I don't want to encounter that. So I would rather pick up some object and put that at the center of my attention so that I can successfully distract myself away from the real issue. The real issue is not out there. The real issue is here (pointing inward). The problem lies here. But I want to talk about this and that so that I can convince myself that all here within is hunky-dory. No attention needed. Whereas all that attention is needed here.
The job is not sentient. Ever seen a job suffering? Ever seen a job wailing? Does that happen? Ever seen a job committing suicide? Does that happen? The job seeker, the job holder, is the one who suffers or celebrates or continues or quits or dies. Therefore, all the discussion must be about the job seeker.
But our education does not take us there. We are educated about things, objects. First Battle of Panipat, Second Battle of Panipat, Anglo-Maratha conflicts, the World Wars, everything out there. Physics, chemistry, everything out there. Finance, marketing strategy, everything out there. And therefore, it is not entirely surprising that this kind of a discourse hesitates so much in coming to the individual.
We want to talk about everything apart from ourselves.
I must know what is important for me. I must look at myself. I must look at what speaks to me, what sings to me. And then I look at the world. I discover what it is that needs to be done there. And then I let a spontaneous mapping slowly emerge. Then there is synchronization. Then I know what I ought to do. Then I need not follow the crowd. Then I might find I am starting out. I am an entrepreneur. I still need money. I still earn money. But the beginning and end is here *(pointing inward). Money now remains a resource to achieve this end. Now money in itself is not the end.
Money is now an enabler, a facilitator, a lubricant, not the real deal, not the end of it all.
And now you cannot say, “I'm so happy I could finally exit my company.” You see, you are an entrepreneur, right? Interesting. Your employee comes to you and says, “You know, I'm dancing. I'm celebrating.” Why? “Because I could finally exit your company.” You would say, “Traitor, deceiver, cheat, backstabber! Call the HR. No, no, call the security. Throw him out. If possible, launch an FIR.” Right?
If your employee does that, you'll feel wounded. He's quitting and celebrating. But the thing is, that's the exact reason why the entrepreneur continues, just to quit, just to quit. That's the day of his festival. That's the day he has been continuously looking forward to: “When will I be able to drop this burden, monetize it, pocket the returns, and run away to consume the returns?”
Isn't that not just ugly, but actually obscene? Isn't that obscene? Please tell me. Would you do that to your employer? Resign and then go and sing and dance and say, “You know, I'm celebrating because I'm finally off.” But the entrepreneur himself is planning for that. This is how obscene that entire game is.
Where is love in this? And what's a loveless life like and worth?
Questioner: Namaskar, Acharya Ji. My name is Rishav Raj Singh. I'm a fourth-year PhD scholar. I'm doing research in linguistics from the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences. Before I begin, I want to make it a little lighter for the audience. It's good that I didn't choose to wear black and white. I'm wearing blue, with the Indian flag on my chest, adding more colors to it.
So my first question is a follow-up question to the first question that she posed to you about entrepreneurship. You said that within us, even though we become entrepreneurs, there is a boy within us who is longing for a toy, and if he or she doesn't get that, there is a tendency to steal it or forcibly acquire it. Quoting that, you also mentioned the Epstein files.
Then my question is that if such is the nature of us as humans, being the peak of evolution with such a sophisticated cerebral capacity and sagacity, what is the advantage of being human if we are also behaving just like animals, eating, mating, and doing all these things?
Acharya Prashant: That’s for you to answer. What do I say? As human beings, there is a potential that is available to you. There is a clear upside. There is also a deep downside. Where you situate yourself on this vertical axis is for you to decide. Nobody outside of you can deliver any kind of existential advantage to you.
That’s the question: “What’s the advantage of being a human being?” The advantage is for you to take. It’s a decision to be made. If you want to take that advantage, you can.
If you want to pass it, you pass it. And there is not just an advantage being offered. As I said, there is a deep disadvantage being offered. The cerebral capacities that you are mentioning can be put to the service of deep inner ignorance. It's not set in stone that because you are born in this privileged species called Homo sapiens, therefore you have an inbuilt advantage. No, you have a possibility. It's for you to honor that possibility or squander it. It's a choice.
But for a choice to happen, there must be a breathing, pulsating, living chooser, right? Do we really choose? We don't. We just react. In reaction, there is no choice. Sodium and water react. There is no choice there. There is a lot of action, but no choice. Right? And that's the way most of us operate throughout our lives, just reacting, just as slaves to situations, carried away by currents, swept away by trends. Therefore, the choice, the advantageous choice, never really gets made. The chooser is absent. How will the choice get made?
